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Your Guide
C. Susan Nunn
Susan is a 'lover of many things.' Her creative endeavors are all fed with her love of nature, balance, and her deep spiritual beliefs. She is a Writer, Editor, Teacher and Writing Coach, and Author. She earned her BA at Vermont College, and earned an MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles, with dual concentration (Fiction and Creative Non-fiction.) She is also a Certified Creative Writing Instructor. Susan is the author of Song of the Earth, a novel said to be the consciousness of our nation and of our people. She has embodied Nature’s balance and peaceful flow of how things should be and applies it to everything she does. It has also helped with her creative writing in developing a deep flow as well as in editing for others. She lives in Boise, Idaho with the four-legged love of her life, Ellie, a Golden Retriever.
Questions? Comments? Email me!
About this course
Mining Truth in Memoir: Digging for our Gold – Our Personal Truth
Writing isn’t just about the arc of the story, but more about where the writer comes from to put forth the story on the page.
Many writers live in their heads and work from their heads, and that is fine if they are writing a nonfiction (factual) piece on nuclear proliferation, the economy, or something along those lines. But, writers of fiction and memoir need to come from a different space. We need to dig down into the emotional state we were in when each episode (memoir) happened, or where our characters were emotionally during the scene we are writing (fiction.) This is where our truth lies, deep down in our senses and this is the level at which the reader will connect.
According to Robert Olen Butler in his book From Where You Dream ‘our readers relate to our stories through their senses’ just like we experienced the story at the time from our senses. Why is it that when we decide to tell the story that we step back from the story, or skirt around the real story - the truth? Is it so we don’t feel the pain, the hurt? Do we think we can skip over the real nugget, and go on to something else? How can our readers feel it if we aren’t there with it? The answer is they can’t, and they are pretty vocal when asked, saying the writer never told the ‘real’ story.
I have taught Mining Truth in Memoir over the last three or four years, and have now revised, tweaked, and re-tweaked a series of exercises and added a couple more so we can hone in even more deeply on this journey. These exercises allow us to sit within that space while we explore what we have uncovered. With each lesson, you will come away with a process that you can use for the rest of your writing career. Each process will stand individually or you can use them all as they build one upon the other, giving each of us many options to travel into our center and explore.
Mining Truth in Memoir: Digging for our Gold – Our Personal Truth is an 8-week course. We will have a Q & A each week to help guide us along, but you can take the course at your own speed, with lots of room for sharing thoughts and fragments of writing. The platform we use is very safe, private and user friendly and invites interaction within our own little community. We will close the class out with an online day of writing, (a virtual writing retreat) - a place where we can put our practices to use, and see what we come up with. Prospecting can be fun. Let's try it!
This class opens for sign-up on February 1st, and will start February 27th, 2017. Let’s make 2017 a year of ‘depth in our writing.’
